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Palisades continues maintenance schedule

Published by admin on Mon, 01/07/2019 - 8:48am

Palisades Power Plant returned to service Dec. 28, following the completion of its successful scheduled refueling and maintenance outage. Control room personnel returned the plant to operation, sending electricity to the grid after a planned shutdown that began Oct. 28. This was the 26th refueling in the plant’s history.
“We are committed to continuing to provide safe, secure and reliable electricity to area families and businesses through the plant’s permanent closure in 2022,” said Charlie Arnone, Site Vice President and Entergy’s top official at Palisades. “Entergy continues to make the investments needed for the plant, as evidenced by the $87 million of work performed during this outage.”
During the scheduled refueling and maintenance outage, trained professionals replaced about one-third of the fuel in the reactor, inspected and upgraded hundreds of pipes, pumps, electrical components and other equipment.
“Around 1,900 professionals, including nearly 1,300 specialist contractors, performed hundreds of activities that can only occur while the plant is offline,” added Arnone. “Hundreds of thousands of person-hours of work were performed over the last several weeks to prepare Palisades for safe and continuous operation over the nextthree years.”
This was the second-to-last refueling outage at Palisades before the plant’s permanent retirement in the spring of 2022. On Aug. 1, 2018, Entergy announced that it had agreed to sell the Palisades Power Plant subsidiaries that own Palisades and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, MA, to a subsidiary of U.S.-based Holtec International for purposes of accelerated decommissioning after those plants’ respective shutdowns and reactor defuelings.
For Palisades, that transaction would not occur until after the spring of 2022 and would include the sale of the decommissioned Big Rock Point Plant near Charlevoix, MI. The sales include the transfer of the licenses, spent fuel, and Nuclear Decommissioning Trusts. The transactions are subject to conditions to closing, including federal approval of the license transfers.